Many digital devices such as PDAs, Cell phones, MP3 players, Picture Frames, and so on are available and gaining traction as essential digital devices. Other digital devices, such as personal computers and televisions, have already gained critical mass and are converging into key digital devices for homes and businesses. However, the utility of the devices would be greatly enhanced by a seamless connection among the various digital devices available to a user. As it now stands, all of the digital devices available to a user are not connected, resulting in a less than optimal island of experience. For example, it is generally not possible to access one's schedule or e-mail from a television. Increasing availability of broadband and the growth and evolution in home and business networks provides an opportunity to connect various devices at home to provide seamless user experience available any time, any where and on any device. Evolution of such a platform at home provides opportunity for ISVs, Telcos, and Satellite/Cable providers to deliver rich integrated services and experiences into home.
A number of software services are needed to enabling rich user experiences among the various digital devices available to users. Examples of such software services include Media Library service that aggregates media metadata from various devices at home, Media Transcoding service that can convert incoming analog such as terrestrial and cable analog data and digital formats such as MPEG2 and MP3 to an internal format such as WMV and WMA for storage and distribution within in home, storage service that devices can use to store persistent data, and calendaring services that maintains family schedule. At the application semantics layer, there should be no fundamental difference between the way a device interacts with a software service and vice-versa and the underlying infrastructure should fully support such an abstraction.
The wide range of digital devices and services available in homes and businesses are deployed/startup in no predefined order and as such it is essential for relationships/dependencies to be formed dynamically and tracked over a period of time. Discovery, rich query capabilities, and eventing (tracking service up/down events) form the basis for building infrastructure that supports establishment of dynamic, tracked relationships/dependencies. As distribution of media and device aggregation are core experiences, it is important for the underlying infrastructure to understand the input/output connections and the location of each device. Thus, connection and spatial information needs to be modeled as well.
In order to allow the wide range of digital devices and services to work together cohesively, it is important that any distributed environment in which they work be tolerant of differences among the various devices. For example, the various devices may have internal information storage formats that differ. Whereas one device may store data in a sql database, another may store data in an XML format. However, there is still a need to allow these disparate devices to communicate data to one another and allow devices to query data stored on other devices.